Today at Mobile World Congress, mobile processor juggernaut Texas Instrument held a press event to offer some additional details about its OMAP 4 and 5 processor lines. Greg Delagi, the company’s senior vice president and general manager, gave the keynote — which took place right on the showroom floor. He emphatically talked about the need to push the capabilities of “smart devices” forward while being mindful of the constraints battery technology puts on the industry. Both RIM and LG were brought on stage — the PlayBook and Optimus 3D both use the OMAP 4 platform — and they too heralded the headway TI is making with its system on a chip (SoC) OMAP processors. The company even has technology in place that will bring cost effective, power efficient gesture recognition and Pico DLP technology to a wider array of smartphones and smart devices; it works just like the Kinect. We have some video of the motion-based gesture recognition, in action running on prototype hardware after the break, along with some of Mr. Delagi’s thoughts on why OMAP is such an effective mobile processor. More →

Just one week ahead of Mobile World Congress, U.S. electronics manufacturer Texas Instrument announced its next OMAP platform, OMAP 5. The updated 5 platform utilized two Cortex-A15 cores that are capable of supporting 8GB of dynamic memory access while running at speeds of up to 2GHz per core. “The OMAP 5 processor includes individual, dedicated engines for: video, imaging and vision, DSP, 3D graphics, 2D graphics, display and security,” writes Texas Instrument. “The processor also includes two ARM Cortex-M4 processors for offloading real-time processing from the Cortex-A15 cores to improve low-level control and responsiveness of mobile devices.” TI is promising 1080p and 3DS recording and playback along with the “real-time conversion of 2D content to S3D at 1080p resolution” from the 28-nanometer chipset. The OMAP 5 platform will, undoubtedly, be powering the next wave of superphones from wireless manufacturers the world over. More →

There it is ladies and gentlemen, the savior and bane of every high school math student enrolled in a trigonometry class between 1996 and 2004: the Texas Instrument TI-83 series calculator. Originally released in 1996, the TI-83 graphing calculator boasted a 6 MHz CPU, 32KB of RAM, and was powered by 4 AAA batteries. This mean little number-cruncher could handle statistic, trigonometric, algebraic, and — obviously — graphing functions; you could also, painfully, enter text into the device. The 83 could also “help” you get through high school math with bootleg games — such as DrugWar and Bowling — which could be side-loaded onto the device via the included data-cable. After its initial release, the device was redesigned and rebranded as the TI-83+ in 1999 and again as the TI-83+ Silver Edition in 2001, before being succeeded by the TI-84 in 2004. What do you say? Have any TI-83 memories you’d like to share with the group?

BGR Throwback Thursday is a weekly series covering our (and your) favorite gadgets, games, and software of yesterday and yesteryear.

Details on ARM’s next generation Cortex A-series processor — code named Eagle — have yet to be fully disclosed, but that hasn’t stopped Texas Instrument from letting us know they’ve licensed it. Via a press release, TI announced that it is, “the first company to partner with ARM in the conception and definition of the next generation ARM Cortex-A series processor core to be announced later this year.” Texas Instrument quips that they aim to, “raise the bar in high-performance, power-efficient computing with upcoming OMAP platform solutions intended to radically transform devices while enriching the mobile lifestyle.” Hit the jump for the full release. More →